Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧@JChimirie66677
Ayesha, your claim that Islamic values and Christian values are essentially identical and produce the same civilisational outcomes isn't supported by the historical or contemporary evidence and you know it.
The specific institutions listed in my previous reply, Magna Carta, habeas corpus, trial by jury, the presumption of innocence, the abolition of slavery, the suffragette movement, parliamentary democracy, the independence of the judiciary, did not emerge from Islamic civilisation. They emerged from Christian Western Europe over a specific period of history shaped by a specific theological tradition. The Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, the nonconformist conscience, the Christian abolitionist movement, these are not universal human achievements that any civilisation would have produced given sufficient time. They are specific products of a specific tradition. If Islamic values produce identical outcomes, identify the Muslim majority country where they have done so.
Where is the Islamic Magna Carta? Where is the Islamic abolition of slavery? Saudi Arabia retained it until 1962 under Western pressure. Libya had documented open slave markets in 2017. Mauritania did not criminalise it until 2007. Across the Sahel, ISIS and its affiliates have enslaved thousands of Yazidi and Christian women within living memory. The Christian abolitionist tradition did not just abolish slavery in Britain. It pursued it globally. No equivalent movement has emerged from within Islam.
On the pro-Palestine marches. No court has ruled a genocide is occurring. My reply documented chants of death to Israel, Iranian regime flags and a government that applied one policing standard to those marches and another to everyone else.
On joining hands. The question is whether the foundational values of this country, which you claim to share, can be defended jointly. That requires naming honestly when those values are being violated and by whom.
The marches you defend carried portraits of Ayatollah Khamenei. The Islamic Republic under his watch had just massacred over 30,000 of its own citizens. It hangs gay men from cranes, stones women to death and funds the proxy networks that firebombed Jewish ambulances in Golders Green. Marching under his image is not a protest against genocide. It is an endorsement of one.
The activists who described Jews as an abomination to this planet, the motion prepared for the Green Party conference declaring Jewish self determination racist, the chants of death to Israel on the Embankment, these are not the products of Christian hedonism. They are the products of a specific political and ideological movement operating within British Islam that you have not named, condemned or distinguished yourself from in either of your replies.
And since you invoke the shared Abrahamic tradition and call for joining hands, where is your outrage over the 4,849 Christians killed for their faith in a single year across Africa and the Middle East, 3,490 of them in Nigeria alone, by Islamist militants? Where is your statement on the 70 Christians beheaded inside a Protestant church in eastern Congo in February? Where is your condemnation of ISIS burning Christian villages in Mozambique? The silence of Muslim voices on the systematic slaughter of Christians by jihadists is not a minor omission. It is a thunderous one. Joining hands requires both of them to be extended.
The difference between Christianity and Islam in the British context is not theological. It is political and demographic. Christianity built these institutions over a thousand years and is now too depleted to defend them. The question is whether those who share the values those institutions represent, including British Muslims who genuinely do, will help defend them or provide cover for those who are actively dismantling them.
That is not scaremongering. It is the most important question in British public life and it deserves a straight answer.
